BALANG NAKURULK (JOHN MAWURNDJUL AM), Black Rock Kangaroos (Nadjinem), 1993

BALANG NAKURULK (JOHN MAWURNDJUL AM) Kuninjku language, 1952 - 2024 Black Rock Kangaroos (Nadjinem), 1993 ochre on bark 154 x 67 cm (irregular) bears inscription verso: MAW 237; Maningrida Arts & Culture certificate verso PROVENANCE Maningrida Arts & Culture, Northern Territory, Cat No. MAW 237 D'Lan Galleries, Victoria Private Collection, Victoria EXHIBITED Reverence 2025, 10 October - 19 December 2025, D'Lan Galleries, Melbourne, Victoria In April 1993, Balang Nakurulk (John Mawurndjul) travelled from Milmilngkan to Düsseldorf for the opening of Aratjara: Art of the First Australians, the landmark exhibition that brought the work of more than a hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. He made the journey with his arts adviser, Diane Moon, one among a small delegation of senior artists, including Dolly Nampijinpa Daniels, Gordon Bennett and Lin Onus, who crossed the world to stand before their own paintings hung within a European institution. While in Germany, he encountered the work of Picasso, an exposure that stayed with him on his return home. That encounter surfaces directly in Black Rock Kangaroos, painted at Milmilngkan in May 1993, in the weeks following his return. In his own narrative text for Black Rock Kangaroos, recorded and translated by Murray Garde, Mawurndjul explains that he "painted this because of an idea I got from Picasso," having been, as the translator's note records, "fascinated by the paintings of Picasso" seen at the exhibition. That idea took the form of the circle at the centre of the composition, denoting the water where the kangaroos drink, absorbed into a story grounded entirely in Kuninjku country and law. The painting registers a European idiom taken up and subordinated to the deeper structure of ancestral narrative that governs his practice. English translation from certificate: Black Rock Kangaroos. A mother and young one, sleeping. This (the circle in the middle) is their water. They went, they ate, they came back and they drank water. Yes, I painted this because of an idea I got from Picasso (translator's note. Mawurndjul painted this bark after returning from an exhibition in Düsseldorf, Germany where he was fascinated by the paintings of Picasso). They are sleeping, they've eaten and now they sleep. Near this water here. In the rocks. The rain falls and the water lies in the rocks. This is a different kind of water, a kind of red coloured water is what they drink. We call this water 'worrkkorl', when it lies in depressions in the rocks. The rocks makes it turn red. That's what they drink. Those black ones (kangaroos). © JOHN MAWURNDJUL / Copyright Agency, 2026

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